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…happens to be the first ring of 2013 as well. I took my XP Deus metal detector to a new park built on the site of an old home. The park is postage stamp sized with a playground area in the middle. Three things made me go there:

1) There was an old house there visible in old maps.

2) The park is in an area of town no one else wants to hunt.

3) There are a couple of very old trees in this park and the dirt around them may lay yet undisturbed.

In fact, it was under one of these old trees that I found my first silver ring of the year at 6 inches deep. The signal was a messy one with a short, sweet audio component a midst some ugly tones . Now,in previous posts, I’ve mentioned these kinds of signals and how I am beginning to really pay attention to them. I decided to dig it even though the VDI jumped all over the place. I was using my primary hunting program on the Deus: Deus Fast with a frequency of 12KHz (changed from 18KHz).

The ring is of the One Size Fits All variety and it looks to be old. It obviously got lost when the house was still standing and inhabited. The markings inside include a jeweler’s mark of JJJ but a cursory search on the Internet yielded no information on the mark.

Now, the question every newbie asks when they find a silver ring with a mounted stone is: Is it a real diamond? The answer is that no sane person would put a real diamond on a silver ring unless we are talking diamond chips. Still, the Cubic Zirconia on this ring is pretty.

So I now have 28 days left on this month to find 8 or 9 silver coins to stay on pace to make the goal for this year.

I took the XP Deus metal detector to the Iron Pit. The Iron Pit has become the proving grounds for all my metal detectors.

The Deus p-owned the Iron Pit!

I have said that I have hunted the Iron Pit until there were no signals left except ferrous signals. Then I took the Tesoro Compadre and was floored that I was able to get a few non-ferrous targets out of the Iron Pit.

Well today, after work, I hit the Iron Pit with the Deus. In essence and for all practical purposes, the Iron Pit has become a live site again, with LOTS of non-ferrous signals.

Iron Pit, p-owned!

I even managed to get a silver earring!

Not pictured are about a dozen pull tabs and beaver tails that were invisible to my other detectors.

This was so loud and clear, a deaf man could have found it.

Getting non-ferrous targets from an iron-infested site with the Deus was like taking candy from a baby.

I used the Deus Fast program that came installed from the factory. I am so excited at the prospect of gridding the Iron Pit with the Deus and seeing what amazing goodies I missed before.

Oh, and I only took the targets that were easy to extract. I left many signals that were deep and will wait for me and the Sampson T-handle digger.

I continue on my quest for gold. I have decided to hunt for gold until I fill a gallon container with pull tabs and other mid tone targets. I am hoping to find a gold item before I fill the container with stuff but I am alarmed at how quickly it’s filling up! I am digging an average of 40 mid tone signals per hour.

Meanwhile, I keep finding interesting stuff while digging for gold. Today at lunch, I returned to the Iron Pit. The Iron Pit is the name I’ve given the honey hole I found last Summer. Anyway, as I was scanning for mid tones, I got a foil signal on the AT Pro. The Target ID (TID) was 45 and the depth was two inches. I dug up an old zinc or lead bell emblem that may have been part of a tag.

Later, I got a mid tone with a TID that jumped from 49 to 50 and back. The AT Pro said the target was six inches deep. I began to dig the hole and just below the surface, I found a tiny tennis racquet charm. It looked pretty nice and silvery and I could see that it had a stamp. When I got to the car, I looked at it with my loupe and sure enough, the mark said sterling.

I am not surprised the charm read lower than a nickel. First, tiny silver can read like that. Second, with all the rusty iron at the Iron Pit, I expect the detector to get confused.

Tiny treasures

So this makes me wonder about how many countless treasures I’ve missed in the year I’ve been detecting because I haven’t been digging mid tones consistently. Heck, for the first eight months or so I downright ignored all mid tones.

And yes, I have to say it one more time: The Iron Pit doesn’t stop giving!

After going around checking small towns around the county, we stopped to visit a friend who just went through the death of her long-ill husband. When we got there, she asked me to help her with her new laptop. In return, she said I could detect around her 100+ year old farmhouse and farm. Score!

I only had 30 minutes or so to swing my coil around the old house. I found some clad and then I had this really loud quarter signal on the V3i. There were no signs of iron anywhere on the V’s screen and it showed around five inches deep so I decided to dig it.

When the spoon came out I checked the stamp on it and I clearly read Stainless. I was disappointed but I moved on. Once we left, one thing kept bothering me. Stainless doesn’t show that way on the V3i and also, something about the stamp bothered me as well. Plus, the spoon looked like silver. When I got home I rechecked the stamp with a loupe and bam! It said Sterling, not Stainless.

Clearly silver

A whole troy ounce of Sterling silver! My first ever silver flatware.

I think this is a little over one troy ounce

I was told I could come back anytime I wanted to detect the farm and farmhouse. I am so stoked!